7.3a The Upper Class

Members of the upper class include high-income earners, those with substantial wealth, or both. This upper class controls a disproportionate and growing share of wealth in the United States and worldwide (see Figure 7.7). Moreover, those in the top 1% have a net worth of at least $30 million and are the ultra-wealthy(Storti & Dagnes, 2021). 

The upper class includes extremely-high income earners, such as some chief executive officers (CEO). The gap between the pay of CEO and the average worker’s pay has increased dramatically since the 1960s. In 1965, the average CEO of a top 350 firm earned about 15.4 times the average salary of “production and nonsupervisory workers” in their company (Bivens et al., 2024). By 2023, this number had grown to a staggering 191.6 (Bivens et al., 2024). Figure 7.8 illustrates the increasing pay gap, which accelerated in the  21st century.

It is challenging to pinpoint how much income someone needs to be considered upper class. However, the Economic Policy Institute has examined wages over time and reports them as percentiles which provides some insight into a dollar amount (see Table 7.3). Moreover, wages have grown much more quickly for those at the top compared to other groups. For example, those in the 99.9th percentile earn annual wages that have increased 353.9% between 1979 and 2021 (Gould & Kandra, 2024). In contrast, the bottom 90% have seen their wages increase by only 43.7%.